1. Field the Invention
The present invention relates to an enhanced mobile communications uplink (the direction of the radio link from the user equipment to the network) and, more particularly, to the content of messages needed between a third generation a radio network controller (RNC) and base station (Node B) to carry out the enhancement within a mobile communications network.
2. Discussion of Related Art
To enhance the DCH (Dedicated Channel) performance, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) agreed on a Release 6 Study Item, ‘Uplink Enhancements for Dedicated Transport Channels’ in October 2002. The justification of the study item was that since the use of IP (Internet Protocol) based services is becoming more important there is an increasing demand to improve the coverage and throughput as well as to reduce delay in the uplink. Applications that could benefit from an enhanced uplink (UL E-DCH) may include services like video-clips, multimedia, e-mail, telematics, gaming, video-streaming, etc. This study item investigates enhancements that can be applied to UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) in order to improve the performance on uplink dedicated transport channels.
The study includes the following topics related to enhanced uplink for UTRA FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) to enhance uplink performance in general or to enhance the uplink performance for background, interactive and streaming based traffic:                Adaptive modulation and coding schemes        Hybrid ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request) protocols        Node B controlled scheduling        Physical layer or higher layer signaling mechanisms to support the enhancements        Fast DCH setup        Shorter frame size and improved QoS (Quality of Service)        
This UL E-DCH can be compared to HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) since HSDPA was for a similar enhancement in the downlink (DL).